I know this is an IT oriented website but I don't see how this only a problem for IT jobs? Does HR, when trying to fill a position of any relevance, really want someone with only 10 or less years of time left?

The only exception I see is in management positions, where experience is a requirement. And, for the most part, these jobs don't require creative work using tools and technology, just managing people and doing budgets. You can be 90 and do that.

I'm sure that offends quite a few people in management ranks who don't feel they are the Pointy Haired Boss in Dilbert. But as the Peter Principle talked about many years ago, that is where people try to go as they age. For evidence, why do so many upper management positions get filled by people who were let go from those positions at another company? Because you are most qualified if you have done it before, age is irrelevant. Let's face it, has the art of managing people and doing budgets really changed in 30 years? 40 years?

Most often (as a professed "old guy" myself), I've found the reasoning is financial. It's always easier to justfiy adding people to your team when they don't cost as much to hire.

Conversely, as this past five years has amply demonstrated, it's also easiest to cut whoever has the largest salary first whenever there's financial concern.

One of the strange fallouts of our "information economy" and society is that the managers of said information, the IT folks, engineers and technicians, are now seen in much the same light as factory workers were in the 20th century - as replaceable cogs in the greater machinery.

No wonder they're "hiring young." The hiring managers in these companies see us as outdated cogs who are increasingly expensive to maintain. I.e., if information is a commodity, then those who manipulate it are like assembly-line workers.

Nature often punishes monocultures, and an all-young person team may be a kind of monoculture. The mature person knows where the pitfalls in the trail lie, having traversed it before. Language skills in particular can weigh in when an older language that's good for a particular function isn't found in the skill set of the Python, Ruby, Node.js crowd.

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